A Six-part Immigration Reform Platform

Over on the Book of Faces, a friend asked the question, above.

A good question in an area I have some expertise in, as well as some thoughts. My response:

Job One is to stop thinking it’s the southern border. The 9-11 terrorists came in by airplane (legally, at least initially), as did most of the illegal immigrants from Ireland, Poland, Russia, India, China, Jamaica, etc.

Job Two is vigorously enforce employer sanctions so that business owners who hire illegal immigrants are not only fined heavily, but may lose their business license as well. Most folks are coming here to work, which is not a sin, but most employers hiring illegal immigrants are discriminating against legal workers (immigrant and citizen) who will ask for better wages and working conditions and who (quite reasonably) don’t think they should have to learn a foreign language to work at a restaurant, construction site, or office cleaning job.

Job Three is YES, we need to hardscape parts of the border. We need about 250 miles of that on the Southern border and about the same on the Northern border. Most of the border is protected by geography (desert, mountains) and the distance from roads on one side to roads on the other. Once someone crosses, there are very few roads, and checkpoints on those roads pay dividends. I know what I’m talking about here — I wrote the first study on US Border Security in 1989 with the former head of the US Border Patrol.

Job Four is we need to reform legal immigration in several ways. Some advocate guest worker programs, but we already have that — we call them “green card” holders. Green card holders should have to revisit their status every five years — become a citizen, or go through a cursory check to make sure they have no serious felony arrests and are paying taxes. It should be made explicit that a green card is simply a work visa — not an open ended invitation to date but never mary America. People are — literally — dying to come to the US. Folks that don’t want to become citizens after 10 years need to be shown the door. Changing the status of green card holders enables a sensible expansion of work visas *along* with a very strong push to learn English and participate in the polity.

Job Five is to recognize that we have a special relationship with Mexico, El Salvador, and Guatemala. We need to encourage economic development and political stability by increasing investment and imports, especially of agricultural goods. We can take goods or people. Goods is a better choice.

Job Six is to teach AMERICANS about immigration. We are a country built on stolen land from people who were systematically massacred, and by the labor of millions of people who were enslaved. Most of the west was originally Spanish — not English speaking, not Norwegian or German, Italian, Armenian, French, or Polish. Our immigration laws have *always* been racist, first excluding Asians and then Africans (the current “family reunification” policy was *explicitly* embraced in 1965 to exclude Asians and Blacks). We need to end the nonsense where white folks say “my people came the right way — legally.” In fact, there was no barrier to white immigration, and companies systematically recruited white Europeans to settle on stolen Indian land. No white person in America can claim they were “legal” unless they can show me a visa stamped by the tribe on whose land they now live on.